KL: By far the most powerful way to break people out of their media-consumer trance is to air “anti-ads” on TV. If you broadcast a message that deliberately goes against the grain of commercial television, it can grab the public imagination and have a profound effect. For example, an anticar ad today has all the potency an antismoking ad did twenty-five years ago. If a few brilliant anticar messages started popping up every now and again, that would rile up the global automakers—and get people thinking. If an ad came on pointing out that over 50% of the calories from a Big Mac come from fat, well, that would be the perfect curve ball to throw into our increasingly obese society.

Such thirty- and sixty-second “mind bombs,” as I call them, can trump corporate power, prod lethargic governments into action, and catalyze cultural mindshifts. I think it’s important to have dissenting voices popping up on TV; otherwise it becomes just one long twenty-four-hour-a-day advertisement for a lifestyle of consumption. One of my favorite mind bombs shows a young man intently watching TV while a voice intones, “Your living room is the factory; the product being manufactured is you.”

IM: This method of ad-busting must be very expensive. Don’t you have to buy the advertising time on television?

KL: Yes, and we’ve had a lot of difficulty doing that, not due just to the expense. In fact, Adbusters Media Foundation was born as a result of commercial television stations refusing to sell us airtime, even though we were willing to pay the standard rates. For over ten years now, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the big three networks in the U.S.—ABC, NBC and CBS—have routinely refused to sell us airtime for any of the dozens of campaigns we have tried to broadcast. Just one station, CNN, started selling us airtime three years ago, and that was only after a persistent Wall Street Journal reporter began grilling them about why they were refusing to deal with us. Thirty-second spots on CNN Headline News cost at least $1,500 each. This year we plan to air our Buy Nothing Day message on Larry King Live. That will cost us around $15,000.

IM: Isn’t it illegal for the networks to refuse your ads? Couldn’t you sue to force them to sell you airtime?

KL: In Canada we had a five-year-long legal action against the CBC network. We fought it through the Supreme Court of British Columbia, to the B.C. Court of Appeals, and eventually to the Supreme Court of Canada. We thought that we would be able to win under the Canadian Charter of Rights, which guarantees freedom of speech to all Canadian citizens. But the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear our case. Now we’re trying to launch a legal action against ABC, NBC and CBS in the U.S.

IM: What do you suggest that individuals might do to protect themselves and their families from the assault of the corporate media, and beyond that, to help change the existing system?

KL: Each one of us has to decide for ourselves what to do. Some people might participate in Buy Nothing Day, just for starters, and then begin thinking about consumerism and our unsustainable economic system. What aspects of our culture really feel wrong in your gut? Do you feel upset when you see your son or daughter zoned out in front of the TV, absorbing that desire-creating fare? Do you feel sad and angry when you’re walking or bicycling through your city and suddenly realize that you have no alternative to breathing poisoned air? You have to look inside and let the rage build naturally. After that you’ll find lots of others who feel the same way.

There’s a time in everybody’s life when you have to take a journey inward and confront the demons inside. That is a journey we all have to take. But after awhile, especially if you have some success within your own heart and mind, then the time comes to take another kind of journey—a journey outward. That journey is a journey into culture, into the heart of the speed and the greed, to confront the external demons. That’s what culture jamming is all about. —Kalle Lasn

IM: You say in your book, Culture Jam, that we need a new kind of activism that has nothing to do with traditional politics, or the political Left or Right.

KL: I grew up in the Left tradition, and in my youth I passionately fought all the battles. I was part of the antiwar movement, the Black liberation movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movement. Somewhere along the line, I started feeling uncomfortable with the jargon and the style and the failures of the Left. Then, about ten years ago, I suddenly jumped ship. I decided that if I was going to be part of a social movement that could actually create a better world, I would have to leap over the dead body of the Left. The big issues of our time—environmental destruction, media concentration, car culture and climate change, the brainwashing of our kids, the taking over of education by commercial interests—all of these issues really have nothing to do with the Left or the Right. They are about fighting against ecological and psychological degradation and creating a viable future on our planet. So I’ve opted out of that tired old Left-Right debate and now call myself a culture jammer.

IM: That’s a rousing statement of purpose, but it seems as though your movement contains an inherent critique of capitalism and would classically be considered leftist, or at least politically liberal.

KL: I agree that our current brand of capitalism is dysfunctional in many ways, but I don’t believe there is anything fundamentally wrong with free markets. Instead, I argue that capitalism would work much better if we had “true-cost” markets. For instance, right now you can walk into an automobile showroom and buy a car for $20,000, but that price reflects only the manufacturing costs and the automaker’s profit. It doesn’t include the cost of the damage you will do over the next few years—pumping carbon into the atmosphere through your tailpipe and causing climate change, creating urban congestion, and all the other kinds of problems associated with cars.

If we added these environmental and social costs to the price tag, then experts estimate that your car would cost you $50,000 instead of $20,000. That extra $30,000 could be used to clean up the pollution you create, build public transit systems, and so on. If we could convert our current market system into a true-cost system, in which the price of every product told the ecological truth, I would have much less of a problem with capitalism. Then it might be workable. The problem with the political Left is that they hate markets and capitalism so much they can no longer imagine solutions like true-cost.

IM: So this true-cost market would preserve freedom of choice and competition but also recognize the commonly shared resources of the planet and help to protect the overall quality of life for all.

KL: I think so. And I believe that there is a growing momentum for this kind of change. There is a movement of people who are neither from the political Left nor the Right, who have different but somewhat related concerns. I saw their glorious diversity in the “Battle of Seattle” during the World Trade Organization meetings.

IM: What role might the new Buddhist community in the West have to play in this movement for change?

KL: I am not happy with the kind of Buddhism that has appeared here in the West. It has been watered down into simplistic notions of inner calm and easy platitudes about love and peace. In the Japanese Zen tradition there is a rough soul and a gentle soul, and the universe is seen as an essential intermingling of both. I think Western Buddhism needs a bit more of that rough soul. I would like to see a few of us challenge the status quo a little more and confront this runaway consumer culture of ours that’s creating so many ecological and psychological nightmares. We should be striving to catalyze a new, less materialistic, less psychologically corrosive and more sustainable culture to hand down to future generations. It’s time for some of us to create a ruckus in the tradition of the Buddhist warrior, cutting through delusion for the sake of all. In this planetary endgame we’re in, the rampaging cultural warrior is just as important as the deep meditator.

IM: You seem to have gotten one of those rough souls.

KL: Yeah, I think I got me a rough one. But it feels authentic and grounded. I feel that I am still part of the tradition that I admired so much when I was a young man living and studying Zen in Japan. There’s a time in everybody’s life when you have to take a journey inward and confront the demons inside. That is a journey we all have to take. But after awhile, especially if you have some success within your own heart and mind, then the time comes to take another kind of journey—a journey outward. That journey is a journey into culture, into the heart of the speed and the greed, to confront the external demons. That’s what culture jamming is all about.

From the Fall 2002 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 19, No. 1)

© 2002 Inquiring Mind